I wish to file a complaint. Our travels in Italy thus far have taken us to various galleries, the walls of which have been full of paintings of the lives of the saints. Here’s St Nicholas, saving a ship from sinking. There’s Poussin’s gruesome depiction of St Erasmus being disembowelled. St Sebastian pops up, full of a quiver of arrows, at almost every turn.
But – and here’s the thing – almost all of the saints concerned are male. Yet there are so many incidents in the lives of the female saints that would seem worthy of artistic attention.
Take St Kallioppe, who “lived in the reign of the vicious Emperor Decius, an extremely callous and pompous monarch who took delight in barbarous acts”. “Taken to a public square, she was bound to a post and mercilessly flogged.” Surely a perfect subject for a Bernini sculpture, the stone weals ever-so realistic?
Which Michelangelo ceiling depicts St Columba the Virgin – the daughter of a sixth century king and queen in Cornwall, who refused to attend the pagan temple with her parents? “Shocked at her behaviour, they had Columba whipped and then thrown in prison.”
And what about Saint Christina, “the daughter of a rich and powerful magistrate named Urban”, who broke her father’s collection of gold pagan idols and distributed the pieces among the poor. Daddy was unimpressed and had her “whipped with rods and thrown into a dungeon”; surely Titian could have brought the scene so memorably to life?
Yet I’m not sure whether it’s the artists who are to blame for their male-saint-only policy, or those responsible for the museums in question. Perhaps these fabulous works do exist, yet are kept from the public gaze – proudly displayed on some curator’s office wall, hidden away in some cardinal’s private apartments? Is it too much to dream of our own National Gallery, perhaps, seizing the opportunity to run one of its blockbuster exhibitions: “Flogged, by the Masters”?
There’s about a billion of St. Catherine with her eyes on a plate, but that’s not really my style. Still, YKIOK and all that…
I actually had to look those saints up, as I thought you’d made them up… I’m so untrusting, and now owe you an apology!
@Scarlett – we saw St Catherine in Rome
She’s stuffed under some altar or other. Actually, to be more accurate, most of her is stuffed under the altar. Her head’s apparently in Siena.
@Eliane – would I ever make things up? (Actually, as I wrote this, I nearly wrote a PS specifically for you saying that these are actually real saints!)
If you don’t restrict your repetoire of “Artistic Whippings” just christian notables but extend it to other deities, stretched across the corner of the “initiation chamber”, panels vi and vii at the vila dei misteri, just a 1,000 m. NE of Pompeii station “show two themes, “torture and transfiguration, evocative climax of the [dionyssian] rite” being undergone by a young and naked woman. “Notice the complete abandonment to agony on the face of the initiate and the lash across her back.” says the guide.
There is also an even older mosaic, I’m not quite sure in which building, which portrays a woman bent over and being caned then buggered by one man while she sucks another’s penis (running a bit of a risk there. 😉
I also have a lovely Bougereau print of Cupid being spanked, a theme which several renaissance artists painted, perhaps the best being Agostino Carracci’s – Venus punindo, where Eros is “horsed” and blindfolded so he’s unable to see Venus’s birch approaching.
R
Fascinating stuff, Redhead – thanks.
Anyone interested in the Pompeii image can find it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pompejanischer_Maler_um_80_v._Chr._001.jpg